Your response does not explain police shooting obviously unarmed people. Your response does not explain our police beating obviously unarmed people. Your response assumes that people in the US are more dangerous. And your response ignores the obvious - that we allow the police to get away with their unnecessary violence. As a society, we could crack down on. Obviously as a society, we implicitly condone their actions. Hell, reading the apologia in some of these threads, we have a portion of the population who not only defends their violence but applauds it.
Our compromise over our gun rights and the danger of guns is to concede that policemen may use lethal force to respond to any perceived threat. There is no other viable solution.
Of course there are viable solutions. An obvious one is to crack down on their unnecessary violence. Another is to refocus their efforts from protecting their asses from any conceivable threat regardless of its realistic possibility to dealing with actually keeping the peace.
What is an "obviously unarmed person"?
A person whom the police have little or no reason to believe is actually armed.
For example:
How do we "refocus their efforts from protecting their asses from any conceivable threat regardless of its realistic possibility"? There is no defensive value in a gun. It cannot protect anyone from a bullet that is already in the air, on its way to whatever it hits. The only protection it offers against being shot, is the chance to shoot first and straight, at the other gun owner.
That's a really great way to start: we begin by training cops to STOP obsessing over the possibility of being engaged in gun battles and START training cops in conflict resolution, psychology and communications so that they are able to avoid potentially dangerous situations (or at least avoid making such situations MORE dangerous) and efficiently maintain orderly communications with suspects and bystanders alike while maintaining a rational, professional demeanor.
IOW, police officers need to stop worrying about loosing gun battles and start learning how to establish real order in their immediate vicinity. It remains the case that civilians are shot and killed by police officers ALOT more often than the reverse.
"Refocusing" begins to sound like, "Stand still and present a better target, while you figure out if the other guy is armed and has hostile intentions."
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG that guy's looking at me all angry and he's skeery and I don't know if he has a gun and my life is in danger!